March 13, 2018 – Infraredx, a company that works in intravascular imaging for mapping coronary artery disease, today presented a poster at the American College of Cardiology (ACC) 67th Annual Scientific Session supporting the value of combination intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) imaging technology to identify lipid core plaque (LCP), an underlying cause of serious cardiac events. In the poster presentation, IVUS +NIRS demonstrated efficiencies in locating LCP within arteries, indicating the technology may be a better predictor of major adverse cardiac events (MACE) than the current methodology standard set forth by the PROSPECT study.

“This analysis validates the use of dual-modality IVUS + NIRS catheters to clearly pinpoint LCP with increased efficiency compared to IVUS alone,” said Jason Bottiglieri, president and CEO of Infraredx. “Unlike other imaging technologies, NIRS can readily distinguish areas of stable plaque from potentially dangerous LCP, which may enable cardiologists to more accurately predict and ultimately prevent serious heart attacks.”

The PROSPECT Study found in a sub-study that the plaque disease arc via transverse IVUS was an additional independent predictor of non-culprit lesion of MACE. However, the area under the curve (AUC) parameter that was observed in the study was low (0.64) and the methodology only included use of gray-scale IVUS.

Infraredx utilized a similar disease arc concept in an IVUS + NIRS autopsy study to reveal the benefits and limitations of the disease arc concept. Since underlying pathological truths can be known in an autopsy study, the degree to which disease arc finds lipid core plaques could be studied, as well as novel methods incorporating the unique IVUS + NIRS chemogram map of vessel lipid core could also be explored.

The study concluded that quickly locating areas of LCP with NIRS, and then assessing the disease arc on IVUS cross-sections of interest may be more targeted than use of the IVUS disease arc alone. It also may be more clinically efficient due to the automated and immediate generation of the NIRS chemogram.

“PROSPECT demonstrated that vulnerable plaques can be detected with IVUS technology, but with only modest predictive ability,” said Gregg Stone, M.D., Columbia University Medical Center and New York-Presbyterian Hospital. “As demonstrated in this study, NIRS offers the potential to further discriminate plaques, which are likely to be particularly high-risk such as those with high lipid content, a hypothesis that is being tested in ongoing PROSPECT II and LRP studies.”

The opening late-breaking trial at ACC 2019 is the Apple Heart Study, a large-scale, app-based study to identify atrial fibrillation using a smartwatch. Earlier, smaller trials showed this approach might be used in a population health application to proactively identify AFib patients earlier.

A patient who received the HeartMate III LVAD system showing off his external battery pack. He served as a patient ambassador in the Abbott booth at ACC.18. The HeartMate III, with its magnetic levitated pump, showed a big reduction in clotting over previous LVADs in a key late-breaking trial at this year's conference.